Like many kids in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Elvis Mutapcic played plenty of basketball and soccer growing up in the country that saw regular struggle and conflict.

In his spare time, he also found ways to feed his increasing interest in combat sports.

“I put up a homemade heavy bag,” Mutapcic told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “I tried to practice as much as I could and learn about what I was doing, some boxing, some kickboxing, some karate.

“We had to have things we could do inside, to stay kind of hidden sometimes.”

After this past weekend, Mutapcic is no longer such an unknown to many MMA fans. At Saturday’s Superior Cage Combat 2 show in Las Vegas, Mutapcic scored a knockout win in 25 seconds against Cezar Ferreira that has created some buzz for the Iowa resident.

The punch that sealed the win, a big left hand to Ferreira’s midsection – a shot that caused an immediate and loudly enthusiastic reaction from the fight’s commentators – has been several years and countries in the making. Now Mutapcic hopes it can help him earn more opportunities.

To get there, Mutapcic went through a childhood that included a front-row seat for the Bosnian War (1992-95) as well as the unrest before and after the technical boundaries of the conflict.

He helped his family move to the United States and settle in Iowa, a place that fueled his early interest in combat sports. He worked a series of odd jobs to help support his family while his mother went through an illness.

Once he found a serious MMA training schedule and committed himself to the sport, the 25-year-old middleweight built a 9-2 record capped by his eye-opening knockout over the weekend.

“More than anything, I want to be able to fight for a living, not split it between a full-time job,” said Mutapcic. “I train twice a day, and it takes a lot of time. But I’m happy that I even have the ability to fight.”

Growing up in war

In some ways, Mutapcic has been fighting since he could first walk. That was part of life in Bosnia, he said.

“It wasn’t the most pleasant place for a kid growing up,” he said. “You kind of had to hold your own. If you weren’t having your stuff taken away by a bully, you were taking it away from someone else. It was a constant thing.”

When Mutapcic was 4 years old, the Bosnian War began with plenty of activity in his home city. Technically, the war ended when Mutapcic was 8 years old, but he says that didn’t necessarily mean life was much easier for him or his family, including an older brother and a younger brother.

Mutapcic’s older brother became Mutapcic’s main male role model, but it was Mutapcic himself who helped his family decide to move to the U.S. By 1999, paychecks for the parents’ jobs came months late, if they came at all, and Mutapcic thought of a solution at first as a half-joke.

“I was really being sarcastic because I had an uncle who (moved to the U.S.), so I said, ‘Why don’t we go to the U.S.?'” Mutapcic said. “But they liked it.”

Mutapcic’s family landed in Des Moines, Iowa, which placed him in a key MMA spot. The only thing he had to do was learn English.

MMA hot spot

When he first moved to the U.S., Mutapcic was in the eighth grade. His motivation for learning English, if he’s being honest, was to be able to talk to girls.

“I watched a lot of television, a lot of Music Television, you know, MTV,” he said. “You can learn pretty quick when you know what you want to do.”

Not everything was as pleasant. As his mother battled illness, Mutapcic and his brothers worked jobs, including Wendy’s, construction, laying title, mechanic – almost anything that could earn them a paycheck. Mutapcic carried that extra responsibility throughout his high-school days.

When he was 17 years old, he learned about a local spot that held fighting nights, and he lied on the form to claim he was 18 so he could participate. He remembers winning 15 consecutive fights in this loosely organized format, which eventually was shut down.

After a break of several years, Mutapcic returned to MMA in a more serious way. He found a new gym, and by age 22, he was taking his training more seriously and looking for more fights.

After a loss in June 2009, Mutapcic won five straight fights to run his record to 8-1. He suffered a unanimous-decision loss in June before returning this past weekend for his impressive knockout.

Mutapcic had prepared expecting a long fight and three full five-minute rounds. The fighters moved around each other before Ferreira tried a spinning kick and attacked again to push back Mutapcic. On his third attack, Ferreira moved Mutapcic before Mutapcic swung with his right hand and landed his left to the midsection, which dropped Ferreira immediately.

“I really didn’t think it would be that quick or easy,” he said. “I thought I would have to wear him down and go the whole fight.

“I’m obviously glad it turned out the way that it did.”

Award-winning newspaper reporter Kyle Nagel is the lead features
writer for MMAjunkie.com. His weekly “Fight Path” column focuses on the
circumstances that led fighters to a profession in MMA. Know a fighter
with an interesting story? Email us at news [at] mmajunkie.com.

A total of 26 fighters got their chance to shine on Saturday as part of UFC 190 at Rio de Janeiro’s HSBC Arena. Now that UFC 190 is in the books, it’s time to commence MMAjunkie’s “Three Stars” ceremony.

The man known for cranking submissions to the point of injury added eye-gouging to his repertoire. But is the controversy of Rousimar Palhares too essential to his bizarre, awful appeal for his employers to take any meaningful action against him?